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The Iconomy of Creative Currencies in the City of Knowledge:
a Transmonetary Approach
Gilson Schwartz
PhD, Professor, Dept. of Film, Radio and TV, School of Communication and Arts and
Graduate Interdisciplinary Program Diversitas, Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and
Human Sciences, University of São Paulo, Research Leader at the “City of
Knowledge” Research Group and Curator, Youth Portal, Municipal Secretary of
Human Rights and Citizenship of São Paulo
Diego Vianna
M.A., journalist at “Valor Econômico” and PhD student at the Graduate
Interdisciplinary Program Diversitas, Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences,
University of São Paulo, Researcher at the “City of Knowledge” Research Group
Abstract
In this paper we, we begin by exploring the theoretical implications of a non-naturalistic, iconic
percpetion of Money as both media and technological artifact embedded with affection. From Marx
to Weber but also Simondon, Deleuze and Derrida, we discuss the future of Money from a conceptual
and logical perspective taking digital emancipation as the new value frontier for human development.
Based on the Simondonian approach to “transduction”, we advance a new concept of
“transmonetization” or a “transmonetary approach to the iconomy of creative currencies designed to
leverage the knowledge production and sharing process in contemporary networked economies.
Index
1.
2.
3.
4.
Iconomics
Creative Currencies
City of Knowledge
Conclusion: A World of Innovation and Sustainability Helix (WISH) Come True
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1. Iconomics
After two decades of internet propaganda, the political and economic issues underlying the
advocacy of technological convergence as a gateway to freedom of expression and economic
emancipation are still much neglected, despite the evidences to the contrary (especially after
the 2008 global financial crash) such as the prevailing of global surveillance and data
“snooping” for the benefit of business interests, the emergence of the “precariat” (Standing,
2014) and other perverse effects of “being digital” such as the crowding out of relevant offline
activities in the time distribution of citizens, their political propensities and identities.
This paper examines the allure of digital currencies as part of the new iconomic effects of
digital convergence on the periphery of the capitalist system as Brazil became a major global
consumption space and financial hub in the aftermath of privatization of its
telecommunication sector, infrastructures and key social policies (such as education).
We view currencies as framed by Iconomics, an emerging interdisciplinary research program,
along the path suggested by Joseph Stiglitz since the emergence of information as demanding
a new scientific paradigm in economics as well as following the lead of more historicist and
hermeneutic approaches to social, technological and monetary realities.
A key, practical issue in the emerging field of iconomics relates to social currencies viewed
from the periphery of the global capitalist system as a long term policy geared towards the
emergence of a participatory culture led by digital innovation and social emancipation.
What are the social protagonists of the new digital participatory framework? What are the
effects on the geopolitical economy of places of memory, culture and knowledge? To what
extent are still valid some of the most relevant approaches to local development policies such
as industrial clustering, triple helix development and creative industries if the digital coevolution does not relate to the foundations of value, wealth and sustainability?
The iconomic perspective acknowledges the “relational turn” in economic geography that has
shifted our focus from structure to agency to “processeses of technological appropriation”.
What is the role of popular and activist cultures in the promotion of the
convergent/participatory ideology which would apparently lead us beyond the “either/or”
mindframe,opening paths to autonomy, emancipation, creative production and wealth
distribution? What are the limits to citizen-based currencies and exchanges leveraged by
ICTs? How is the definition of money itself liable to these affects, images and values?
Is the MIT utopia confirmed by the geography of internet domination and corporate control of
telecommunication and financial infrastructures? Who is appropriating the income and wealth
creation flows in a world of supposedly lower barriers to entrepreneurship, empowerment and
creative entrepreneurship?
The contradictory nature of the digital icon economy is already evident at the core of
innovation-based metaphors, narratives and paradigms.
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The
productive power of connectivity and entrepreneurship discourses at both the Center and the
periphery of the global economic system is at stake. What does it mean to be digital at the
margins of transnational flows?
Is the State still a relevant player in the post-global experience? What are the new roles for
academic research and university networks in the promotion of a new political economy of
culture and knowledge sharing?
These issues show up clearly on the agenda of the Oxford Internet Institute, for instance, in
their most recent Call for Papers bearing on the fascination associated to entrepreneurship and
the diffusion of technologies of connectivity (the Internet, mobile phones, and Web-enabled
devices, gamification, smart cities).
The global media (such as The Economist), development agencies and a new generation of
global investors focus on “sweeping development gains”, “transformation” “technological
leapfrogging”, the “data revolution” or “acceleration” driven by entrepreneurs and the spread
of ICTs. Is this a real process that cuts through the world growth stagnation and monetary
volatility? Are financial, monetary and fiscal frameworks irrelevant on the edge of these
innovations?
Is the youth actually benefiting from these convergent technologies via new jobs, “start-upism”, “artivism” and a new “street” and “public square” politics that would result in a global
political “Digital Spring”?
2. Creative Currencies
There is a particularity to the iconomic notion of creative currencies in the context of
complementary and social currencies. This creativity is an index of an affective connection,
required for any currency to be effective. The very essence of the digital economy, that is, its
“propensity to virtualize”, creates the field of opportunities for a digital Keynesianism of
sorts. Except that the multiplier and accelerator now reach and transform not only the
financial estimation of cash flows but any objetct, body or media prone to virtualization (for
instance, as in gamification of interfaces and patterns).
It is true that by nature every alternative currency is creative in at least one sense: by
producing detours in the flow of money, shifting the possibilities to transact, altering the
meaning of monetary relations within a group and between this group and the rest of the
system, a currency or a time bank are creative, meaning that they alter the economic, and most
importantly, the social landscape. They develop clusters of divergent economies, thus creating
a new sense of possibility for value.
As it goes, some forms of currency claim to be extremely creative, namely cryptocurrencies,
most of all bitcoin, that purports to consist in a self-engendering currency of pure code that
raises from the sheer spending of energy (i.e. electricity) by means of chains of command
beyond human control.
But it is still necessary to stress and develop in further detail what it is that makes for the
creative character of currencies as we conceive it. Indeed the very project of populating the
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world
with complementary currencies implies the creation of entire forms of language that express
values that pertain to people in their common existence.
Yet the most relevant feature from our standpoint is that these people relate in diverse ways,
which means that value itself is diverse; and currencies can indeed express this diversity,
inasmuch as they communicate and give meaning to expressions of value, i.e. they confer
social significance over singular manifestations of a valuating relation.
Take the notion of time banks, which link the values of people’s labour, for example personal
services, to the value of the labour of others, which might be needed sometime, in a relation
of projected and virtual wants, to which projected and virtual gestures correspond in actuality,
through the availability of one’s labour-time.
Take regional complementary currencies, which bind neighbour to neighbour through smallscale commerce, giving actual density to a notion of community that could perfectly well
have remained merely virtual. Take once again cryptocurrencies, which foster the
establishment of global communities of people with a like mind about the need to overcome
big financial institutions and central banks in their power to control the flux of money – and,
most importantly, financial instruments, interest, debt.
The common aspect of these initiatives, which we wish to bring to the fore, is essentially
communicative (and thus, affective), inasmuch as they reorient and reorganize meanings in a
collective field.
This is why we should evoke a rather disturbing but provocative sentence, as Diogenes
Laërtius reports it having been told Diogenes the Cynic by an oracle – this sentence has been
picked up by Foucault and later on also by Michael Hardt: “deface the money”,
“parakharattein to nomisma”, sometimes also translated as “falsify the currency”.
This is obviously not a call to counterfeit actual money, but rather to understand that any form
of money only works as such because it comes with a face, or rather it is a face, the visible
form of a certain force; this is the force of valuation, which is of collective nature, even if
ultimately it is subsumed under the face of the king, or a god, or the creditor – ultimate
instances of value determination.
This is also not meant literally, as in the “heads” of a coin, but by the simple fact that when
we use money, we know where its value comes from and which force it is that guarantees its
continued value, and how far this force is willing to go to make sure this value, its own value,
is reiterated.
To deface money in this sense is to point a finger at this force, and then bypass it, or
overcome it, or act in its interstices. How to do this, and why, are the first questions we need
to ask. It is very important to remember that we have been long operating over a limited
understanding of the nature of money – as if money were, in its essence, a commercial
instrument that allows for independent individuals to trade among themselves with discrete
goods, seen as commodities. “The oil which renders the wheels [of commerce] more smooth
and easy”, as Hume would have it.
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This
definition, convenient as it may be for economic analysis, doesn’t help us beyond this field
and has been under heavy fire from anthropologists and sociologists, at least since Marcel
Mauss’ seminal essay, On Gift.
Mauss identifies the origins of money in sacred objects and emblems of clans that changed
hands during ceremonies and festivals, most notably, of course, the potlatch. And it was
during these festivals, as a side feature, that a smaller event would take place, which is the
kula, the exchange of use values, i.e., goods, mediated by valuable objects, but much less
valuable than those exchanged among kings and priests.
Actual, daily commerce, even when it is organized in a way that resembles modern-day
markets – and in most non-modern societies that is not the case – are dependent on the
certainty that higher transactions, with a whole different set of significations and values, are
taking place, so as to define the common ground in which this particular, commercial, relation
can occur.
Now to the nodal questions: are we allowed to draw a parallel between this non-modern, noncapitalist relation between higher and lower transactions, transcendent and commercial
values, and modern-day economies?
Could we identify the larger ceremonies with the financial transactions that, today, take place
among big actors, investment banks, governments, funds, and the smaller kula to the everyday
economic life in which people work, buy and sell, save and invest, produce and consume?
Could we do the same referring to the age of the gold standard, in which the great majority of
economic actors – normal people, that is – never actually saw a coin made of gold or even
silver? If so, would this be yet another meaning for the famous Gresham’s Law, according to
which bad money draws away good money, while the latter hides in the big player’s chest as a
reserve of value – the one that actually is worth something?
This is possible in at least one sense, which is that of the generation of a common, social
meaning, grounding value throughout the social fabric. Which brings us back to our problem
of how to “deface” money – only to “reface” it in multiple faces – and also to our problem of
currencies as creative, or better yet: as the field of creation, i.e. invention. If we recognize that
much of the economic meaning that takes form monetarily is derived from a transcendent
instance of high finance, then this is where the faces of the money to be defaced take form.
These values come to be collective and get to circulate as a result of their assuming the form
of images, that is, their iconic character.
That is how they are “faces” (inter-faces) that can be “defaced” and “refaced” in multiple
manners – just as the images of value can be multiple.
In her book Image, Icon, Economy, the Art Historian Marie-José Mondzain demonstrates how
the circulation of Byzantine icons had an important economic role in keeping the unity of the
empire in the 13th Century, by offering a common, but malleable ground for different social
sectors and spread-out territories to relate to imperial and religious power. In the opposite end
of the same phenomenon, Viviana Zelizer demonstrates in many works, most notably The
Purchase of Intimacy, how even contemporary national money, which is supposedly of an
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absol
ute level of abstraction, is ear-marked to represent the roles of genders, classes, ages, and
other forms of social difference.
The face of money, its image character, its iconic mode of functioning, has many levels,
relating both to the transcendent forms of finance – its “potlatch” aspect, the gold bars in Fort
Knox, the indexes in Wall Street, the constant flow of bonds and debentures, and to its most
immanent day-to-day common aspects of salaries, commerce, allowances, mortgages.
These are connected through a series of instruments that confirm the image of money’s
transcendent face: contracts, with interests, debts, obligations.
This is why the possibility to create new forms of currency, which are of course new circuits
by which values flow, implies the establishment of diverse faces for diverse monies, faces that
are images of values in their diversity.
This is not to say that one could simply create a table of values, with their corresponding
faces, their corresponding currencies, and what the proportion would be in which they relate
to each other and can be exchanged into each other.
Something of this sort would only correspond to a different form of categorically chopping
the reality of value production, which is no different, though in a different scale, to what we
can see in relation to national currencies and exchange rates.
The whole point is to accompany the emergence of values with the emergence of
corresponding images, which are the iconic vectors of the values themselves. This
corresponds of course to the emergence of the collective character with which they will reveal
their own forms of value.
For example, to step aside from the excessively economic distinction between use value and
exchange value, let us come back to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between cult value and
exposition value: each value in this case is the value of its own cult and its own exposition,
which is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to make art and culture actually fit into the
regular monetary system of values with its transcendent face.
This is why this gesture by which the monetary forms are refaced calls for an exploration of
currencies as a creative force.
Complementary currencies offer a possibility to create a whole new set of images by which
we can interpret and make circulate the values that we produce as communities,
corresponding to different forms of exposition and therefore, of communication, beyond the
mere idea of commerce as an exchange of goods: commerce is always also a statement on
value, on an agreed, i.e. produced, equivalence.
The creative aspect of this process is the fact that the images that operate in this social field
can be generated immanently and transform into one another, inverting and even subverting
the face of the transcendent currency that actually belongs to a different level of value
creation and circulation – and, as we often see, and are seeing now, also destruction.
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This
point brings us to the issue of the technical character of currencies. The generation of images
is, after all, the first level of creation, and by extension, technical invention. It is the case of
prototypes, stereotypes, models, schemes, and so on.
Money creation takes advantage of and derives from the technical possibilities of the social
configuration in which it takes place. This is true of the transcendent, financial, governmental
monetary forms, from the sacred objects of the potlatch to the gold standard and to state debt
held by the global banking system, and it is just as true of alternative monetary forms.
Creating monetary forms in times of digital technology has its own particularities, given the
tremendous power and perils of algorithms and block-chains.
This is the age of high frequency trading, of mobile payments and of cryptocurrencies: images
of perfected transactions, immediate flows of cash and untouchable strings of codified money,
impermeable to human intervention.
To what extent do these modalities express the creative possibilities of currencies? How
different are they from digital versions of the already existent and well known transcendent
image of money, that of the financial system and central banks?
Are they affirming once again the face of dominant money form or are they defacing money
to give it in indefinite diversity of potential faces?
The purpose of the creative currencies project is to explore these questions and the
possibilities opened by the new forms of communication and invention that come with digital
technologies.
3. City of Knowledge
The City of Knowledge was founded in 1999 and acts as a multistakeholder association based
at the University of São Paulo which strongly emphasizes Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) as a strategic factor for economic development in the knowledge era.
The project was selected after a Call for Projects issued by the Institute of Advanced Studies
at the University of São Paulo.
The City of Knowledge is a civic intelligence project and a forum for open audiovisual digital
businesses in Brazil. The City´s mission is to promote, position, represent and defend in the
public sphere the public interests mediating projects that engage companies, social entities
and individual users involved in activities, relations and businesses by electronic means with a
strong emphasis on information and knowledge processing for public problem-solving.
Its main goal is to encourage digital emancipation as a strategy for development and
modernization of socio-economic, political and cultural relations, focusing on the
sustainability and competitiveness of audiovisual digital business models.
The City of Knowledge is open to creative connections to on-line retail; international
telecommunication companies; global hardware manufactureres; software and technology
companies; Internet portals; traditional law firms and consulting companies; leading
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companies in all economic sectors as well as emerging leaders in the civic sector and
academia. The City actively pursues further, complementary support via material or
immaterial resources among its constituency.
Since 2003, the “City of Knowledge” research group has done theoretical, empirial and
applied research related to complementary currencies and financial innovation in the
knowledge society. This project aims at the extension of gameplay (or “gamification”) to
monetary economics and investment finance, organizing vast support from e-commerce
players in Brazil and globally so as to foster local creative development initiatives associated
to the issuance, management and distribution of intangible assets tagged as complementary or
social currencies.
These tokens of intellectual, artistic or civic motivations will be used by the “citizens of
knowledge” as credits or digital “badges” for circulation of products, services and knowledge
in digital networks connected to the internet of objects and networked systems.
Public, private, non-profit and individual, entrepreneurial agents will be able to cooperate and
compete in this habitat of innovation which will affect manufacture, environment and culture
in Brazil and globally.
New forms of digital intermediation and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing will lead the
University of São Paulo and its partners in the City of Knowledge to the next frontier of value
and development theory, requiring the development of new applied sciences such as
Iconomics and the networking of heterogeneous actors capable of building up co-evolutionary
paths in the spirit of the “triple helix” paradigm (active civic action on the part of the
government, the markets and different areas of society).
A number of faculties, laboratories and research groups at the University of São Paulo as well
as public, private and academic partners in different areas of the planet are joining the City of
Knowledge in the creation of this new “IMF” (Imaginary Money Fund).
Advanced engineering, innovative finance and a core of humanistic values preside over this
ambitious project that has been in the making for the last 10 years, after being selected by the
Institute of Advanced Studies as a leading project in information and communication
technologies leveraged by citizenship and human rights.
USP and the partners of the “City of Knowledge” are committed to cooperate in the design,
technical development, practical implementation, reporting and assessment of creative
currencies as units of account and means of payment for transactions involving games for
change, creative economic activities, educational and training credits as well as new forms of
risk and credit rating digitally synched to big data related to learning.
The “City of Knowledge” project at USP is now at the stage of accelerating spin-off led to the
creation of a spin-off start-ups and new projects as a hub for the “Youth Portal”, an initiative
sponsored by the Municipal Secretary of Human Rights and Citizenship of São Paulo.
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Acting as a digital emancipation hub, the “City” acts as curator for content, technology and
monetization of the Youth Portal.
There are immense challenges in order to coordinate the creation and management of
intellectual property associated to the project as well as digital certification of partners and
their transactions, constitution of funding strategies and offers to the public.
The “City” evolves into becoming a “real” iconomy, as an “incubator-accelerator-inspirator”
of social and creative enterprises, projects and content, with non-profit as well as for-profit
start-ups clustering for local and global development.
The underlying educational process will be sponsored through educational campaigns with
the support of the University of São Paulo and branded “City of Knowledge” under the
curatorship of economist, sociologist and professor Gilson Schwartz.
This project was recognized among the “Top 30” of the Development Gateway Award in
2006 and has been awarded the National Project Prize by the Ministry of Culture of Brazil
(2009-2010), the PRIME-FINEP Award in 2009 and sponsorship by BNDES, Volkswagen
Foundation, AMD Foundation, Mozilla Foundation and the Framework Program 7 of the
European Union (2009-2012).
Educational campaigns will focus on the creation of local, community-led and peer-to-peer
complementary currencies associated to learning practices, problem-solving and artivism.
The educational campaign will offer the opportunity for large-scale, online learning of content
producing activities, functioning as a virtual incubator of digital audiovisual content and new
business models.
This “melting pot” or “innovation habitat” of local communities connected to the web and
self-organized for the creation of expressive content will promote an innovative and
collectively designed network of intangible assets such as learning time, knowledge sharing,
inter-grades cooperation in schools, action-learning and action-research, netnography and
small business creation/incubation.
The creative incubator environment is already fostering microbranding, new local P2P
projects, open source game and software development and a fair trade culture expressed in the
distribution of information systems under different licenses (not only public or “creative
commons”).
The big data associated to the functioning of this socio-cultural monetary system is going to
feed new market intelligence and consumer trends. The sharing of this information may also
lead to new public policies as well as democratize local finance, credit and entrepreneurship
from a very early age.
In order to tag the initiatives connected to this incubation of knowledge an content spaces,
creative currencies (educational credits) will be issued by the City of Knowledge, with the
support of companies and social entities of all sizes that wish to contribute to a sustainable
digital development of an open society in Brazil.
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At the
City of Knowledge, curators and supervisors will be involved in the creative monetary council
that will organize, as an e-marketplace, the supply of currency and credit associated to the
knowledge creation and sharing campaign.
Those “spending” knowledge currency locally, wisely or aiming at sustainable and intelligent
flows of occupation, employment, revenue and return on investments, will be digitally
certified by the network of universities, educational schools, private companies, public and
third sector entities associated to the project.
According to the strength of the supporting network, these certifieds credits will be traded for
goods, services and other assets. In short, creative currencies are a form of “play money”
associated to a mass incentive to learning, civic action and entrepreneurship in the creative
economy.
What is the problem the City of Knowledge Iconomy project seeks to address?
“Too much credit for the poor to consume crap”, this is the prevailing “development” policy
as advocated by the mainstream governmental and economic establishment.
The bottleneck: no funding for knowledge-creation in a fast developing “bottom-of-thepyramid” mass market – consumption-led growth is unsustainable, consumption with
declining knowledge assets creation is even worse.
As the Brazilian economy stabilized from a fiscal, monetary and financial perspective, the
government has been incapable of setting up an agenda for the Knowledge Society.
On the other hand, the research that led to the development of the creative currencies project
has been funded by the Presidency of Brazil as part of the digital inclusion agenda or the early
21st century and has been awarded numerous prizes and sponsorships by public entities such
as the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Science and Technology, Receita Federal and the
Development Gateway Award.
What will the project accomplish?
We hope to foster higher informal and open enrollment indices in knowledge creating
processes among the poor and also among the economic elite (not yet technical elite),
leveraging the communicational infrastructure of digital,open networks so as to:
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Implement educational campaigns associating wealth creation to knowledge access,
Intensify the democratization of hardware, software and design spaces in audiovisual
markets (digital TV, m-commerce, tablets, game consoles, cell phones, etc.),
Promote the highest possible exchange flows between knowledge currency and other
forms of credit (microcredit, innovation funds, venture capitalists, angels, mutual
credit, intelligent real maintenance, smart cities, P2P security and surveillance, etc.),
so a sustainable ecology between pro bono and profitable, non-proprietary and
proprietary emerges and is measurable via digital certification of the mobile units of
account and means of payment associated to education and culture,
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Develop theoretical as well as institutional and global support for the democratic and
self-regulated paradigm, valuing the rationality of individual choice given the best and
most sustainable incentives without fiscal losses and imbalances, with intense
participation of the private sector and non-profits, local and global,
Network with research-action opportunities for intangible assets in the knowledge
economy,
Approach economic actors and associations, civil society, educational networks and
public policy-makers commited to an open society with a sustainable digital
development agenda, so as to advocate knowledge as a course of value, wealth and
employment for democratic societies.
4. Conclusion: A World of Innovation and Sustainability Helix (WISH) Come True
As governments inject billions into private labs and research universities, the challenge for
economic development is to convert these investments into paths towards sustainable projects
that can innovate and create value and jobs in the long-term, mostly in what has been usually
named “creative economics”.
The “City of Knowledge” research group at the University of S.Paulo (USP) has partnered
with the Technology and Sustainable Innovation Research Center (PGT) at the Faculty of
Economics, Business Management and Accounting (FEA-USP) to formulate a research
program geared towards this vision of economic development. It is the WISH – World
Innovation and Sustainability Helix Research Program.
The PGT/City of Knowledge proposal research is now in its third year of implementation,
facing the challenge of converting this injection of funding, a one-time windfall revenue
offered by the University’s Office of Research, into a new global cooperation platform. The
policy-concept of a Virtual Knowledge Iconomy (VIKI) is at the center-stage of this
innovative approach to human development in urban areas.
The main strategy for turning science and technology into local economic growth has been
research parks and incubators. At their heart, these were real estate plays, using low-cost land
to create a low-cost home with easy access to research universities for technology-driven
firms. In the 1980s, the emphasis shifted from attracting corporate branch plants and offices to
creating and growing new startup firms. Instead of just subsidizing land, incubators provided
everything from seed funding to bookkeeping for their tenants.
The thinking was two-fold: dating companies was a zero-sum game playing regions off
against each other, and growing firms locally would be more sticky and likely to produce
secondary benefits. Essentially, this was the Silicon Valley model, seeking to create a rich
regional mix of mobile labor, entrepreneurs and clusters of firms. Almost universally,
incubators have been positioned around universities, in the hope of leveraging their research
and talent.
Research parks and incubators, however, are starting to show their age as an economic
development tool. Shifts in the way research and innovation happen are leaving them behind,
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and
pioneering new models of collaboration that will require us to forge new models leveraged by
digital literacy, networking capacity and imaginative roadmapping for research and
development. The next generation of innovation-based economic development must address a
dramatically different world from the one in which research parks and incubators were born
and thrived.
Even the most successful parks are now confronting the need to reinvent themselves for the
next fifty years. They are provoking a strategic discussion with peers around the world about
the role of place in tomorrow’s networks of innovation. The WISH project is based on
interviews with experts in innovation and entrepreneurship, scientific collaboration, university
research management and urban design and development so that to identify trends that will
challenge our existing models for technology-based economic development in coming years.
Some preliminary propositions are being tested:
The Biomedical Supremacy. If the 20th century was defined by physics and electronics, the
21st century will be defined by biology and biomedical clusters according to a very different
set of rules than IT industries did.
Networked Science. Science is becoming globalized, which means that local clusters cannot
exist in isolated modes. To succeed they need to be connected to other innovation hubs, using
technologies such as cloud computing networks leveraged by creative P2P strategies.
They Work Together. Young scientists pioneer massively collaborative work styles. The
institutional foundations of science will be shaken, from journals to patents to university
research.
Lightweight Innovation. The helix for innovation should favor lightweight and open
innovation strategies. The inevitable disconnect means a need for new systems that can take
raw breakthroughs and prepare them for commercialization.
The Persistence of Place in the Net. While science is taking full advantage of the web, place is
important for the creative collaborative work that can’t be virtualized. But the way young
innovators use space will be more dynamic, ad hoc and flexible.
Universities of the Future. Leading research universities treat intellectual property like
corporations of yesterday, while the most innovative companies are opening up and becoming
more like yesterday’s universities. As universities shift roles from ivory tower to economic
engine to creative hubs, fundamental flaws in technology transfer mechanisms will become
all too clear and the cultural ethos of academia will be questioned.
The trends described are global trends, which means there is little that economic policymakers
in any one community can do to regulate the speed or scope of how they play out. But there
is one more important trend, the growth of regional approaches to technology-based economic
development.
We are just beginning to see the outlines of this approach, which involves many partners –
research parks, large research-driven companies, startups, universities, investors and
professionals – working together to develop virtual knowledge iconomies (“vikis”).
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These
creative knowledge production/sharing networks consist of a number of elements, some
formal/explicit and other informal/tacit such as research partnerships between universities and
companies, social networks of entrepreneurs, professionals and amateurs, investor cliques and
clubs and virtual networks and their members both inside and outside the local environment.
Virtual knowledge iconomies (vikis) are different from clusters, because they aren’t limited to
a single industry, and companies aren’t necessarily the most important pieces. In a sense, for
vikis, firms are but one way for the network to express its needs and forge icons related to
what technologies ought to be commercially developed (such as the “smart city” icon, or the
“creative industries” icon and so on and so forth).
For instance, when enough people in Silicon Valley begin experimenting with a new
technology, inevitably a whole array of firms launch to develop it further. Firms emerge from
the virtual iconic ecosystem, not the other way around.
The strength of Virtual knowledge iconomies (vikis) is that they can adapt faster than national
systems, which are dictated by federal politics, and they can scale up successful local
enterprises and start-ups much more effectively that individual research parks or
municipalities. This is one reason why major policy think tanks are all advocating that federal
research grants be targeted to regional and even local partnerships of federal labs, universities,
companies and entrepreneurs with a global perspective.
What is our WISH?
The challenge of building virtual knowledge iconomies is enormous, and will not be
accomplished without significant, sustained and coordinated investment and effort by every
level of government over the next decade. But individual agencies and organizations can start
to prepare for, and the foundations for future growth by taking steps today:
Get Foresight. Start a conversation in your community, and connect it to others on a global
scale, about the long-term opportunities and threats to technology-based development.
Map Networks. The most interesting things going on in your university happen within the
very institution, but we probably haven’t measured them. Map the pipelines of people, ideas
and money moving through. When we talk about these networks, we can be specific about
what they are and what they do as well as how they can evolve as virtual knowledge
iconomies (vikis).
Sell Community. The attractiveness of successful Virtual knowledge iconomies (vikis) like
Silicon Valley is the community and social and business networks therein. Find success
stories (including the bold failures!) and connect them to your local strengths and assets.
Flexibility. If anything defines success to today’s economic climate, it’s flexibility, resilience
and agility. Global partnerships provide more choices when designing programs and create
buffers to rapid economic shifts. Instead of new buildings, think about how to make
technology spaces mobile, temporary, open and accessible. Why should incubators only be
for startups and not students or artists? Be flexible, even if that means not being permanent.
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Management School at Federal University of Bahia - Salvador, Brazil
Unive
rsities. Universities are likely to remain the hub of all successful virtual knowledge iconomies
(vikis), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be equal partners. As their importance in economic
development grows over the next decade and beyond, they have the potential to place their
interests above the local vested interests.
In recent years, a number of concepts have been proposed for modeling the transformation
processes in university-industry-government relations. From “national systems of innovation”
(Lundvall 1992; Nelson 1993) to the “triple helix” approach that evolved integrating
knowledge management, network morphologies and industrial clustering perspectives,
governance issues have always been an underlying challenge to the understanding as well as
to the management of innovation systems. More recently, this governance challenge in triple
helix models has been further complicated by the emergence of fuzzy innovation processes
deeply entangled into ever more complex and internationalized innovation processes and
sustainability requisites.
Recently, the debate over the Triple Helix model has focused on the question of whether there
is a fourth helix or more (Etzkowitz; Zhou, 2006; Leydesdorff, 2011). Various candidates
have been suggested, such as labor, venture capital, the informal sector and civil society
(Etzkowitz; Zhou, 2006). However, some authors argue that introduction of a new helix might
cause a triadic model to lose its creative dynamic.
However, innovation, involving changes in the physical and social environment, inevitably
raises issues of sustainability, the ability to meet, “(…) the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” (Etzkowitz; Zhou, 2006).
Thus, an expanded model is required to incorporate a critical dimension, such as
sustainability. To resolve this paradox, Etzkowitz (one of the creators of the Triple Helix
Model) and Zhou proposed a Sustainability Triple Helix of university–public– government as
a complement to the Innovation Triple Helix of university–industry–government, thereby
introducing a missing element into the model, while retaining the dynamic properties of a
tertius gaudens. i.e.. the capacity of each party to instigate innovation in case the interaction
between the other two becomes stuck for any reason.
To produce even more innovation within the evolutionary cycle of the triple helix innovation
model is the main goal of the WISH project, with the ensuing priority to the formulation of
public policies and effective mentoring to entrepreneurs, policymakers and citizens in their
strategic roadmapping and positioning in face of the challenging world-scale innovation and
sustainability helix (the WISH).
This metainnovation model expands upon the triple helix innovation paradigm in three main
respects:
Use of development “vectors” rather than “factors”,
Digital globalization as the translocal, transdisciplinary and transmediatic “triple axis” of the
world society, thus conveying the emergence of an ICONOMY as the vortex of all vectors,
The emergence of the “play” vector, that is to say, the importance of dematerialization
processes, especially in the communications realm (culture, education, science, technology
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Management School at Federal University of Bahia - Salvador, Brazil
and
entrepreneurialism – the basket of intangible assets and services or iconic and ludic,
immersive and deeply cultural “bias” of the knowledge society).
The latter is dependent on the economy of attention, the motivational or iconic “affective
demand” along with the traditional economic “effective demand”. The actual entertaining and
playable dimension of goods, services and objects which exist only as interactive, immersive
and intelligent “memes” determined by cultural and behavioral patterns of communication.
This process is convergent with the emerging internet of objects and interconnected systems
(IoT) and the “gamefication” of social and economic processes intensively served by global
digital networks).
Moreover, a methodological implication of this “networked helix” model is that each vector,
actually operating as world networking process or “vector”, sums up to a macro-iconic
representation of the global network as an “actor-network”, open to emergent forms of
organizational culture and innovation, expanding the “images” of the organization (Gareth
Morgan) into the next level, that of the WISH (a world-scale innovation and sustainability
helix).
Last, but not least, the networked helix framework must be applied to its own image as well,
so that the connections among the three vectors (manufacture, habitats and iconomic “bias”)
via the expansion of the digital infrastructure and governance is a key transversal factor of
production that must be translated into specific effects and affects.
A new science is needed in order to tackle the different roadmaps for the interaction among
manufacture, habitats and the basket of intangible assets and services which are embedded
with more information and knowledge processing/memory/innovation capabilities in the 21st
century. In this new historical arrangement of economic development, production, society and
environment are the vectors to be growingly connected, this is the crux of the new triple helix.
Compared to the classical triple helix, there is a clear shift towards the vectorial forces that
actually shape human development rather than a sectoral taxonomy (public, private,
academic, etc.). The evolving frontiers of material and intellectual property, regulation,
governance and accountability practices that correspond to the changing connections among
production (manufacture), society (socio-demographics of territories and sustainable human
development) and the “knowledge economy”, a dematerialized sphere with cooperativecollaborative dynamics that are aptly described as “gamefication”.
The emergence of public policies geared by gamefication (the “Games for Change” global
network is an example, as well as the research project with BNDES on the future of the games
industry in Brazil, attributed to PGT/USP) also opens up conceptual as well as applied
horizons.
The WISH research project will explore and expand the triple helix research, development
and innovation agendas with a firm commitment to the role of the University in the cocreation, acceleration and inspiration for innovative and sustainable habitats and bias with a
long term mission of enhancing human development on a local, regional, national,
international and world well-being.
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Management School at Federal University of Bahia - Salvador, Brazil
This
practical deliverable of the WISH project (connecting PGT to strategic hubs and habitats of
social and economic innovation at USP and beyond) will in the long term serve not only the
purposes of spreading the results of the WISH project but also of organically and gradually
transforming the PGT itself into a WISH “machine”, that is to say, a world-scale generator of
innovation and sustainability “helices”, connecting its semantic infrastructure to global and
local institutions, organizations and citizens willing to become entrepreneurial actors of new
development models.
The innovation curve of the WISH research proposal with respect to the classic helix
paradigm is thus to move our policies and strategies from sectors and factors into vectors and
actors. This will serve both the challenge of contributing to the evolution of a global,
universal and accessible helix for human development and advancing its own organizational
and coordination capabilities to a much higher level of efficiency, scale and sensitivity to the
historical circumstances of Brazil and contemporary society.
Beyond the reports, one of the deliverables of the WISH project is to design and implement
this information and knowledge management hub that will be capable of connecting
organizations, businesses, public agencies and citizens into roadmapping and projectevaluation procedures that are consistent with WISH findings in the areas of manufacture,
socio-environmental and cultural dimensions of human development.
The goal of the WISH research program is to propose a roadmap to the global contemporary
integration of innovation and sustainability into new forms of productive transformation in
manufacture, environmental and cultural growth and development. Creative currencies
express and accelerate the process of WISH becoming a reality.
The still ongoing financial crisis in developed economies presents yet another frontier for the
revision not only of monetary conventions but also of university-industry-government
relations, insofar as despite the prevailing instability and uncertainty emerging markets may
find opportunities to at least partially overcome their legacy of economic dependency,
technological backwardness and social imbalances.
There has always been considerable debate over the empirical basis as well as the normative
implications of the Triple Helix model, which matured mostly after the mid-90s, at a moment
when economic development and global integration peaked, innovation and market
liberalization gained momentum and a “flat” world was supposed to flow naturally from the
prevailing successes. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) seemed poised to
unleash the gigantic forces of scientific and technological advancement in favor of an
unprecedented expansion of the market economy, stable wage relations and an overwhelming
financial intelligence.
This long cycle of postwar industry-led innovation, market-based regulation and
individualistic cultural creation and consumption, however, came to a crisis which has been
compared to the birth of the modern era while leading the emergence of a world,
cosmopolitan society that would see its full completion in a new renaissance.
Since 1997, however, regional crises revealed capitalism to backfire into global war and
terror, growing social inequalities as well as uneven international development, division of
labor and intellectual property, worrying environmental exhaustion and recurrent credit
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Management School at Federal University of Bahia - Salvador, Brazil
boom
-bust cycles that came closer to a systemic crisis after the real estate collapse in the US and
the ensuing fiscal implosion of the European monetary project.
For many observers and critics, the realities of the capitalism crisis called for a complete
abandonment of market regimes, often in favor of neo-romantic or nihilist calls to arms and
further violence, perceived as some sort of “natural” resolution of ever more complex
conflicts and self-reinforcing contradictions. Others have pledged a blind faith in the healing
properties of open innovation, in and for itself, as if science and technology without proper
governance habitats, cultural and spiritual embodiments could magically bring contemporary
society into the “21st Century”.
The WISH analytic framework will address the conceptual, political and applied quandaries
of reinventing socio-technical development beyond both the neo-romantic and the ultratechnicist evangelisms into a renewed design of triple helix models.
It requires an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to long term analysis of human
development, integrating manufacture processes, environmental concerns and cultural
challenges into a very specific form of paradigm change, stressing the urgency of “helix
innovation” as sustainable and culturally diverse trajectories.
In short, “helix innovation” is to be framed in terms of governance issues and habitats that are
highly dependent on emerging networking and knowledge management patterns, a new role
for multinational corporations born out of developing markets (such as the BRICs),
environmental challenges which translate into new technological and socio-economic
clustering as well as a growing importance of “soft power” (that is, economics of culture,
intellectual property and social services).
From a broad, long term developmental perspective, the rational or rather illuminist
inspiration for the advancement of science and technology as a founding base of social and
economic life has to be reinstated as policy related.
In short, the coming evolution of the triple helix paradigm will center on the governance
agenda associated to innovation and environmental sustainability issues, that is, beyond
“innovation” in and for itself as a self-regulated process.
The emergence of mid-sized geopolitical nation-states (Brazil, China, India and others in Asia
and Latin America) and enterprises will play an unprecedent role in the upcoming design of
global integrative processes in manufacture, environmental and cultural development.
The WISH project will provide the roadmap for the new economic and regulatory challenges
that lie ahead, contributing with an online, live platform for universities, government
agencies, companies and civil society to gradually forge the socially and environmental
conundrums of future prosperity and well being.
It will also naturally emphasize the role of the University, especially of USP, in creating
conditions to the convergence of new ideas, technologies and visions, helping to connect
among knowledge areas and strengthen the relation between academia and the relevant social
and cultural environments for sustainable innovation in the world iconomy.
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Management School at Federal University of Bahia - Salvador, Brazil
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